I Know What You Did Last Summer

The novel’s original version was set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, which was changed to the Iraq War for modern audiences. In the Q&A at the end of the book, Duncan states,

[…] No matter where we are in history, we’re probably going to have a war, and all you have to do is change the name of the war and you’ve got the same story. I see very few differences between then and now—these are unpopular wars that many people feel we should not be or should not have been involved in [...]. Here it transferred automatically into another war, and that’s a pretty horrible thing to think about (206).

This is not the first work in which America’s many wars have been transposed to benefit audience sensibilities. M*A*S*H—the movie and the television show— featured the Korean War as its setting. This allowed it to express anti-war sentiments in popular fiction against the contentious Vietnam War, only one year before the first publication of I Know What You Did Last Summer.

The ongoing nature of America’s involvement in wars is highlighted in both editions of I Know What You Did Last Summer.